August 8th, 2008

Halo No CD Patch

One of the things I hate about original games is that some of them are so well protected, that I have to keep the CD or DVD in my drive to start it up and to play. Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of pirated games, but I hate not being able to install the game, use the serial provided with it, and then simply put the DVD or CD back to its case, into my library, and forget about it for a while, until someone comes along and I have to show him or her my latest acquisitions. Fortunately, some game producers decide to fix this, and today the time has come for Halo players to cheer and jump for joy!

Created by Bungie and published by Microsoft, Halo: Combat Evolved needs no introduction, so let's get straight to the point - the 1.0.8.616 patch for the PC version of this notorious game has just been made available to the public, and after installing it, you'll never be required to insert the CD every time you play again, but one "annoyance" remains - the need to input your unique CD key to play online. Anyway, that shouldn't be a problem, as long as you purchased the game, right?

The patch is also said to contain "several fixes for server-crashing security bugs," and you can manually download it from the Bungie website.

Unfortunately, it seems "anti-aimbotting is an arms race that we're not going to enter for this old game, and this patch doesn't address that or any other feature-level changes. I should also note that Bungie does not officially support Halo PC (which is owned by Microsoft, not Bungie) but since the build machine is under my desk and not at MS, I fixed these several bugs as a favor to the community."

Well, since it's a pretty old game, we should be happy with what we got, after all. Thank you very much, guys, in the name of those thousands Halo: Combat Evolved fans still out there!